When building flooded hull-type autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV), the component arrangement is typically designed first and buoyancy foam is subsequently packed around the components. This method of packing an AUV may require machining several custom pieces of buoyancy foam. However, while buoyancy foam may be machined with relatively great precision, the machining takes times and is expensive, increasing the cost of manufacture. Therefore, there exists a need for a more efficient method of packing a vehicle.
Furthermore, a vehicle such as an AUV may be built with a monocoque structure. Such vehicles may have an external shell, such as a carbon-fiber or fiberglass shell, and a buoyant material to support the shell, such as a syntactic foam. Although the buoyant material is typically machined to the shape of the external shell, the machined foam and the external shell may not fit exactly together, resulting in empty cavities. Reduced packing efficiency reduces the overall effective energy density of the vehicle. Such cavities provide opportunities to add buoyancy to the vehicle or object, but these cavities often have poor access and/or irregular shapes. Moreover, some situations call for a fixed amount of buoyancy to be added to a vehicle or object, such as when moving between waters of different densities. Thus, a need exists for a method to add buoyancy to irregularly-shaped cavities.